There are genetic variations between races, but they don’t matter. It is co-operation that brings progress to our species.

Is it necessary to believe that racial differences are small and skin-deep in order not to be a racist? For the first half of the last century, science generally exaggerated stereotypes of racial difference in behaviour and assumed that they were innate and immutable. For the second half, science generally asserted that there were no differences — save the obvious, visible ones — and used this argument to combat prejudice.

Yet that second premise is becoming increasingly untenable in the genomic era as more details emerge of human genetic diversity. We will have to justify equal treatment using something other than identity of nature. Fortunately, it’s easily done.

Human evolution did not cease thousands of years ago; it has been “recent, copious and regional”, in the words of Nicholas Wade, a veteran New York Times science writer and the author of A Troublesome Inheritance, an eloquent but disturbing book on genes, race and human history, which was published last week. ...

Perhaps people of Ashkenazi Jewish descent have high average IQs because for centuries their ancestors worked almost exclusively in professions such as money-lending, where exceptional literacy and numeracy were rewarded with greater fecundity. Or perhaps Chinese people show greater conformity because for centuries those who could stomach Confucian rote-learning and obedience got to have more surviving children. These are no more far-fetched arguments than to suppose that ancestral Inuit with genetic adaptations for coping with the cold had more offspring.

Nor is it implausible that over millennia of settled, agricultural and urban living, with the execution or ostracism of “skull-cracker” misfits, selection took place for tameness in the natives of Europe or India compared with say, New Guinea or the Amazon. Thanks to “soft sweeps” — where multiple existing gene variants change in frequency — evolution can work a lot faster than we used to think. ...

So Wade is absolutely right that the old assumption that human behaviour did not evolve much after the divergence of human races at the end of the old Stone Age has to be wrong. The comforting message that biologists sent to social scientists in the 1960s — that they were sure there was no biological basis for race, which could instead be regarded as a social construct — is bunk.

True, the boundaries of races are blurred, and the differences between individuals dwarf those between average members of different races, but differences there are, and not just in skin pigment. The more we look, the more genetic variation we will find between races, as well as between individuals, so we had better get ready to deal with such discoveries, if only for medical reasons. Some diseases afflict certain races more; some drugs work differently in different races.

However, I part company with the next step in Wade’s argument. He tries to explain too much of human history by gene changes. The industrial revolution started in Europe and not China, he suggests, partly because Europe had been preconditioned by genetic evolution for the sort of economic openness that sparked accelerating innovation.

This is based on the work of the historian Gregory Clark (like Wade, an expatriate Briton in America who has written a fascinating new book about social mobility called The Son Also Rises). The evidence from the history of surnames, Clark says, “confirms a permanent selection in pre-industrial England for the genes of the economically successful, and against the genes of the poor and criminal”.

... But surely this was not anywhere near fast or large enough to spark the industrial revolution, let alone as important as factors such as the harnessing of fossil fuels or the invention of inclusive institutions and opening up to trade.

Clark's 2007 book was so important that I reviewed it across two articles in VDARE: first and second.

Just look at how quickly attitudes to homosexuality, say, have changed within a lifetime, with no time for gene changes.

WWG is rapidly assuming epochal importance in the Western mental landscape.

It may be harder to build and run a modern consumer society from scratch using only people whose ancestors were hunter-gathering for most of the past 30,000 years (native Australians, say) than by using only people whose ancestors experienced farming, cities, diseases, alcohol and literacy. But it would be far from impossible with the right institutions.

I think the Viscount went for a bridge too far there in choosing his example. He could have used, say, Maoris in his example. (Here's Clive James on an anthology of poetry supposedly by Aborigines, which he contrasts to a recent poem he really likes by a Maori.) The "right institutions" would have to include a near total ban on alcohol, which the Australian government has been trying in recent years, but I don't know with how much success.

There is a big reason that racial differences in mental capacity will not matter a jot, however many we find. Human achievement is not, despite what professors like to think, the work of brilliant individuals. It is a collective phenomenon.

Every technology, every idea, every institution is a combination of many people’s contributions. There is no single human being on the planet, as Leonard Read famously pointed out, who knows how to make a pencil, let alone the internet, the economy or the government.

The average IQ of a group, a team or a race matters little, if at all. What counts is how well they communicate, collaborate and exchange ideas. Give me a hundred thickos who talk to each other, rather than a hundred clever-clogs who don’t. This collaboration is surely the true secret of human achievement and the true reason that race does not count, not because we are all identical inside.

But can't clever-clogs talk to each other too?

That's a devastating comeback if the big problem is inequality among groups, which has been the conventional wisdom since the 1960s. If that's not really the big problem, then clever clogs and thickos talking to each other will lead to economic growth without necessarily radically changing the rank order of groups' economic potentials. And that's pretty much what we've seen.

As I tried to point out in my recent piece in Taki's, a lot of agitation is driven by juvenile jealousy over ethnic bragging rights. Biologist Stephen Jay Gould resented that the history of biology featured fewer great names from his group than the history of some other sciences, such as nuclear physics, so he concocted a giant, highly successful campaign to get people to believe that his largely WASP predecessors were evil pseudo-scientists.

The world we live in in 2014 is one that looks an awful lot like the one us bad guys describe ... and, guess what, it's not so bad.

86 comments:

SFG
said...

It's not jealousy over ethnic bragging rights. They thought if anyone believed in eugenics it would start another Holocaust. *Anything* could start another Holocaust, which is why we have to constantly fight against racism etc.

"Nor is it implausible that over millennia of settled, agricultural and urban living, with the execution or ostracism of “skull-cracker” misfits, selection took place for tameness in the natives of Europe" - Impulse control.

The average IQ of a group, a team or a race matters little, if at all. What counts is how well they communicate, collaborate and exchange ideas. Give me a hundred thickos who talk to each other, rather than a hundred clever-clogs who don’t.

Granted that the premise is true, and communication is important, it seems obvious that for a given level of communication, greater intelligence is better.

Still, we don't really understand the connection between intelligence, creativity, and genetics. History is well supplied with examples of ethnic groups which rose from intellectual and creative obscurity to great heights in a very short span of time, and fell back again. And we don't know why. Good genetics seems to be necessary but not sufficient.

"The average IQ of a group, a team or a race matters little, if at all. What counts is how well they communicate, collaborate and exchange ideas. Give me a hundred thickos who talk to each other, rather than a hundred clever-clogs who don’t."But isn't communication and group cohesion largely a function of ethnic and racial similarity? Or do we have to pretend that there is no information available on that subject as well?

The Viscount is flat dead wrong on the reasoning that technology advances by group. It self-evidently does not: Maxwell, Faraday, the Wright Brothers, Einstein, etc.

Moreover, OPEN-NESS to change driven by technology matters as much as smarts. Maybe even more. The Chinese invented: gunpowder, the magnetic compass, printing, silk, paper money, accurate clocks, and yet it was Europeans, who were far more open and discarded in an eyeblink feudal norms, military castes, a whole society from banking to farming to social status -- to get advantage.

You saw whole feudal levies and ways of life, supplanted in a few hundred years by the Early Modern Era. No more bows, swords, mounted armored knights, and massive manorial systems to afford them -- instead cheap, fast, highly effective mass levies of arquebus wielding peasants cheaply trained in just a few actions and able with cannons to knock down and take nobility fortresses previously impregnable.

The open-ness of Europeans to get advantage even if it meant overthrowing an entire way of life is why Europe not China colonized the East, the Americas, and Africa.

And its at it again. Elites find ever-greater opportunity to crusade on behalf of non-Westerners, more open-ness to advantage even if it means tearing up the modern welfare state so a few elites can be ultimate leaders.

That's what I assumed the motivation was, and, judging from previous posts, Steve had assumed too. But in Steve's most recent Taki article, he cites a book which claims that many Jews were committed eugenicists up until the 1960s, so Steve has pivoted to this explanation instead.

I find it unconvincing. Jews may not have produced great naturalists but wouldn't Jewish accomplishments in medicine and related fields (e.g., organic chemistry) be enough to preclude Gould, Lewontin, et. al. from such feelings of insecurity?

Maybe neither the Holocaust or Darwin-envy was the primary motivation. Maybe it was the generations-long investment in the advancement of African Americans, a project that started with the founding of the NAACP in the early 20th century and continued through the Civil Rights movement.

The irdea that no single human knows how to make a pencil is insane. I used to make pencils in a small plant in upstate New York forty years ago. They were specialized pencils used for graphic layout, now quite obsolete, but the machinery was exactly the same.

And that is the weakness of the West. Its very flexibility and open-ness to change.

Previously, almost every Western society in history had its leadership drawn from military people who were successful, be they kings, Emperors, Generals, and the like. Ike was the last military leader to be President, and the Older Bush the last one with military service in Wartime.

The Democrats are considering two aging women, and various Black guys plus Oprah and likely Magic as their candidates (don't laugh, its just Obama 2.0) none of whom have any military service much less victories like Grant, or Jackson, or Washington, or even Teddy Roosevelt.

This is very, very unusual. A Roman Republic, Roman Empire, Barbarian Dark Ages tribe, Medieval Feudal kingdom, Early Modern Kingdom, Enlightenment Monarchy or Republic, onwards to the mid Twentieth Century would have thought that lack of military leadership in the elites was a sure sign of defeat and being conquered.

Risk aversion? Universal morality as a club to gain power and social conformity plus junior Witchfinding positions? That's the mark of a female oriented if not led society. It certainly does not describe: the Vikings, Romans, Greeks, Feudal lords, Enlightened or otherwise monarchies, or anything else in the West save the last fifty years or so.

Ridley is crippled by his own elite status and cannot bring himself to say the truth and be labeled a witch. But it is nevertheless true.

Dave: It wasn't "insecurity." Jewish insecurity dropped sharply after the Six Days War of June 1967. There is a variety of evidence suggesting that the Six Days War was the turning point in launching the subsequent propaganda War on WASPs. (My piece of "The Graduate" of 1967 lays out some circumstantial evidence.)

Instead, Jewish security and accomplishment, as symbolized by victory the Six Days War, unleashed a lot of feelings of ethnic superiority that had been bottled up through 1966. What Gould and Co. did in the 1970s was like a highbrow version of a victory riot by sports fans.

Neoconservatism didn't really exist until after the Six Days War. Norman Podhoretz goes 300 pages in his 1960s memoir without mentioning Israel until Israel wins the war, when suddenly he becomes a huge fan.

But hatin' on old WASP scientists was something that could bring together ideologically conflicting elements of the Jewish community. Lewontin was pretty much of a Communist and Gould was generally some kind of socialist, but being mad at old WASP scientists over the 1924 immigration cutoff appealed to neoconservatives too.

The Jewish community is adept at papering over their divisions by finding some non-Jewish bad guy for everybody to get mad at. For example, the rise of feminism in the 1960s had a lot to do with the increase in Jewish guys divorcing their first wives and marrying shiksas. But rather than take a stand on what was really bugging them, it was quickly turned into a war on men in general, with no particular Jewish aspect to the bad guys (although Norman Mailer kept volunteering for the role).

He is wrong about the race of large groups promoting progress being less important than the race of individuals.

Science requires a leaven of really smart people. Maybe only 1:100 or for the mist innovative stuff 1;10,000. But where there are normal statistical distributions which are, say 6% apart, the mid-point of the smarter group at or above which 50% lie will be matched in the lower group by maybe 30% - not that bad. But at the tail of the distribution where only 1:100 of the smarter group lie the other group is likely to have only 1:10,000.

Steve likes to hit the Six-Day War drum, but there is a good deal of truth to his notion that a lot of American Jews basically went berserk over the idea that Israel was a military colossus , with Israeli Sabras as neo-Spartans.

For a comparable Gentile example, one could turn to Irish-Americans and their quasi-hysterical attachment to Ireland. Of course, one crucial difference is that the Catholic Irish, despite their almost preternatural political skills, have not managed to equal the Jews in terms of influence in American society. Still, a comparative study might be quite illuminating.

"The average IQ of a group, a team or a race matters little, if at all. What counts is how well they communicate, collaborate and exchange ideas."

Pure, flat-out assertion. It may be true, but is there any evidence of this at all/ Or is this just what Ridley wants to believe is true?

It may be an assertion but it is a perfectly plausible one. The genes-are-everything theory is also an assertion (Wade states clearly in his book that he is speculating about the behavioral and cognitive differences across races.) Yet that is also a plausible one. People will choose which asserton to believe based on their prior prejudices.

Fun fact about The Six-Day War: The classic STAR TREK episode "Who Mourns For Adonais" (Kirk and Co. encounter an alien who claims to be the Greek god Apollo)was being filmed while the fighting was going on.According to Marc Cushman's book on season 2 of the show, everyone was glued to their radios during filming.

How DO you account for the rapid change in attitudes toward homosexuality, tho?

The sudden homophilia is impressive, considering that in the 60's and 70's, it seemed like animals and the environment might be the next beneficiaries of Western progressivism. Nixon was far more serious about environmentalism than Obama.

But the gay-loving rapidly outstripped environmentalism/animal welfarism, which has correspondingly suffered. This is most evident in the millennials (of which I am one). Most of them think their duties to the environment are satisfied by recycling and using energy-efficient light bulbs. They are famously less ecologically minded than previous generations. Is it because educated whites, who are more likely care about the environment (but why?), are less represented in that class? Maybe.

But there's also the influx of gays and lesbians into the humanities. And perhaps humanities courses in the university have now replaced church as the primary source of moral education. I have T.A.'d for professors who have turned Shakespeare plays into sermons on the evils of racism (Merchant of Venice) and heteronormativity (As You Like It).

It would be interesting to know how the numbers of gays and lesbians in the humanities have changed since the 60s.

"The average IQ of a group, a team or a race matters little, if at all. What counts is how well they communicate, collaborate and exchange ideas. Give me a hundred thickos who talk to each other, rather than a hundred clever-clogs who don’t."

Somehow I don't think that those "hundred thickos" are going to come-up with the atomic bomb. Or the internet. Or the theory of evolution. Or the aeroplane. Or....

"The average IQ of a group, a team or a race matters little, if at all. What counts is how well they communicate, collaborate and exchange ideas."

Pure, flat-out assertion.

It's pretty impressive the way he logically ties together the facts, building his case step by step; and then just when you're thinking, "Wow, this guy is actually dealing with the realities of HBD head-on," he suddenly drops that claim in there with no substantiation at all, like he's mentioning that water is wet, and then sails right on to a conclusion based on it.

His incredulity at the idea that the Industrial Revolution could have arisen at least partly because of heritable traits was puzzling at first. After all, it takes only a few individual movers and shakers to revolutionize any society (and anyway, the IR didn't happen overnight; there was arguably a long gestation period).

It was puzzling - until these two sentences: "Human achievement is not [...] the work of brilliant individuals. It is a collective phenomenon." Sure, but there is a hierarchy involved in any achievement involving a large number of people. Just as the industrial inventor gets nowhere without the masses to turn the cranks, so the masses don't have their Revolution without somebody like him. Both are necessary, but they are not equal.

Ridley's anti-hierarchal, collectivist assumptions here are egalitarianism with a big E. It's telling that he quotes a somewhat obscure libertarian figure (Read). The Right is its own worst enemy sometimes.

At least the review is clear and intelligent. And the "bunk" part was very good.

"Instead, Jewish security and accomplishment, as symbolized by victory the Six Days War, unleashed a lot of feelings of ethnic superiority that had been bottled up through 1966. What Gould and Co. did in the 1970s was like a highbrow version of a victory riot by sports fans."

Interesting. I was watching something on youtube recently. It had Rebecca Goldstein (aka Mrs Steven Pinker) and some other people, and they were talking about the explosion of Jewish American novelists in the '50s and '60s: Bellow, Roth, Malamud, etc. Someone brought up Updike's BECH:A BOOK (Updike's novel about a Jewish novelist), and Rebecca referred to Updike's "Jew-envy."

What made this triumphalism particularly noteworthy was that they felt that there had been no decline in Jewish literary production since that high-water mark, which struck me as odd. I mean, if one discounts Roth, who is still churning it out, it seems to me that a lot of the more highly regarded American novelists of the last 45 years have been Gentiles: Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, Pynchon, Jonathan Franzen, etc.

"""""The average IQ of a group, a team or a race matters little, if at all. What counts is how well they communicate, collaborate and exchange ideas.""""

But isn't communication, collaboration and the exchanging of ideas largely dependent upon a person's IQ? The higher the IQ, the better the ideas exchanged and communicated?

Rachel Jeantel can communicate all she wants and exchange ideas in the same vein (along the lines of "creepy ass cracker") but how effective is she at communicating these concepts? And, as she is a part of her team, so to speak, aren't some teams more successfully effective (e.g. Yankees) as opposed to those that really stink (e.g. Cubs).

Other than Chabon, who might have peaked with Kavalier & Clay, I'm having trouble thinking of a really good, young Jewish American novelist. Foer got a bunch of hype for his awful Holocaust novel, the better part of which was apparently ripped off from an Israeli novelist, but that was largely a function of connections (his journalist brother and his former prof Joyce Carol Oates). I can't think of any writing at Franzen's level.

Maybe most of the better young Jewish writers are working in TV today.

Lucretia:"But there's also the influx of gays and lesbians into the humanities. And perhaps humanities courses in the university have now replaced church as the primary source of moral education. I have T.A.'d for professors who have turned Shakespeare plays into sermons on the evils of racism (Merchant of Venice) and heteronormativity (As You Like It).

It would be interesting to know how the numbers of gays and lesbians in the humanities have changed since the 60s. "

Well, for one one thing, there is "Queer Theory," which basically acts as an affirmative action set-aside for homosexuals. Although there are heteros in the field, you can be pretty sure that homosexuals will be strongly over-represented.

Dave Pinsen:"I think this theory could use a bit more fleshing out. Gould wasn't a shy guy - if he felt this way, I'd figure he was open about it. Maybe you can find a quote from him supporting it?"

Gould wasn't shy, but I rather doubt that he would have consciously acknowledged the kinds of emotions that Steve is talking about. To use Marxian language (it has its uses) Gould's ethnic resentments were the base, while his overt pronouncements were the superstucture.

"Maybe most of the better young Jewish writers are working in TV today."

The standard literary history of Jewish novelists in America is that there weren't any until right after WWII when Mailer and Bellow make a big splash.

In truth, there weren't plenty of bestselling Jewish commercial novelists before WWII in America like Edna Ferber and tons of Jewish screenwriters, playwrights and journalists, but for whatever reason, there weren't many canonical art novelists like Bellow.

And if you are say, David Simon or Matt Weiner today, why write novels when you can write giant TV shows?

It's not jealousy over ethnic bragging rights. They thought if anyone believed in eugenics it would start another Holocaust. *Anything* could start another Holocaust, which is why we have to constantly fight against racism etc.

The reason why Jews identify eugenics with genocide is that they're a group that has adapted to living among other peoples in certain high-IQ niches. A people with a eugenic culture will produce natives with high IQs that can fill high-IQ niches and exclude Jews. Hence eugenics among other peoples is genocidal to Jews.

This is also why Jews identify nationalism, free association, exclusion, etc. with genocide.

Most other peoples do not think this way and rather identify eugenics with ordinary, good, common sense because they are not specifically adapted to living among other foreign people but are adapted to the natural environment.

WIthout knowing it that writer explains why the modern world is full of inferior people. It's true that in the MODERN world no one knows how to make a pencil or any number of other things, and everything is done collectively, including things like movies, music; which is why everything is crappy and second-rate. In premodern world a craftsman knew how to make something from beginning to end, whereas a modern engineer works from blueprints.

Every great idea comes from ONE man, including forms of govt., etc.; successful peoples are those who recognized the superior man and gave him honor and his due. Inferior societies punished him.

Dave Pinsen:"Other than Chabon, who might have peaked with Kavalier & Clay, I'm having trouble thinking of a really good, young Jewish American novelist"

I tend to concur. Chabon seems to have shot his wad.

Interesting to note, though, how Chabon really worked the idea that comic-book superheroes are some kind of expression of the Jewish soul. That kind of thing has become very fashionable (cf the recent PBS documentary on superheroes), but it is also very bogus. The golem idea is palpably ludicrous. Jewish comic book artists and writers were working with the common storehouse of Western myth and popular literature: Sherlock Holmes, Hercules, the Shadow, Philip Wylie's GLADIATOR (the true source for Superman), Tarzan, Robin Hood, etc. Pace Chabon, Jewish American comic book creators weren't products of Eastern European shtetls and Kafka-esque ghettos. They were products of big city America. They weren't reared on Ginzberg's LEGENDS OF THE JEWS; they grew up reading Edgar Rice Burroughs, Kipling, and Jack London.

The other obvious benefit of a group having a higher average intelligence is that such a group would have more clever-clogs. Without enough clever-clogs, it's tough to have a modern economy.

BTW, has anyone done a correlation between countries' average IQs and their postal systems? Something we take for granted is having postal addresses. I had dinner with a friend recently who has been to Ethiopia several times and he said even the fairly modern hotel he stays in there doesn't actually have a street address - it's just "the hotel near the airport".

It may be that you need a certain average IQ (or, perhaps, enough resource wealth to buy outside help) to build the infrastructure for cooperation. It's got to be a real drag on industry when it's hard to know exactly where to ship products.

Jewish female jealousy of the shiksa trophy wife isn't as strong a factor as Jewish daughters' rage at Orthodox Jewry.

Shulamith Firestone is a classic Jewish feminist head case who projected her daddy-rage on America and persuaded more civilized gentile women that they were oppressed.

Think of her famous book "The Dialectic of Sex" as "Yentl" with a paranoid schizophrenic edge projected large on Christian America ... and gentile America is still paying a huge feminist price for Shulie's daddy issues. Not just jealous Jewish ex-wives, but apoplectic Jewish daughters, too. Pity they projected their rage on us.

Steve:"Chabon did about as much as humanly possible with the idea of superheroes as a solely cultural (or maybe genetic) inheritance of the Jews. Kavalier & Clay is an impressive work."

Oh, I agree. Chabon put all of his considerable gifts as a writer behind his thesis, and the end result was a very fine novel. But it just doesn't work as a piece of actual observation.

Steve:"But the idea of The Golem as awesome is awfully lame."

Frankly, the only thing that keeps the idea of the Golem as the ur-source for the superhero from causing hysterical fits of laughter is Chabon's literary skill. Zorro, Hercules, Sherlock Holmes, Tarzan, etc, all have one hell of a lot more to do with the origin of superheroes than stories about the Golem of Prague.

One other Jewish writer, Austen Grossman, wrote a fresh and clever (and short) novel about super heroes, Soon I Will Be Invincible. But his second novel, You, which seems to be a semi-autobiographical tale of working in the video game industry 20 years ago, I put down after 100 pages.

I saw his twin brother Lev Grossman interview Neil Gaiman in New York a few years ago. Gaiman's American Gods was a great novel, but he's probably too much of a genre guy to make it into a novelist pantheon. With his HBO deal, he may be the next George R.R. Martin though.

Steve Sailer:"In truth, there weren't plenty of bestselling Jewish commercial novelists before WWII in America like Edna Ferber and tons of Jewish screenwriters, playwrights and journalists, but for whatever reason, there weren't many canonical art novelists like Bellow. "

The mysteries of the fallow period. We like to think that talent is always around and that major works of art are always in the offing. But history says otherwise.Faulkner kept on writing until his death, but his muse had clearly left him by around 1942 or so. Hemingway could have blown his brains out in 1940 and it would have done no harm to his posthumous literary reputation. It might even have helped. Fitzgerald showed an exquisite sense of timing in his exit. TENDER IS THE NIGHT wasn't as good as GATSBY, but it was good enough that cultists can allow themselves the illusion that he might have managed the trick one more time.

I'd have thought a more likely source of both the timing of the start of the full-scale culture war against the WASPs and Gould-Lewontin's particular hatred of WASP biologists were the 1924 and 1965 immigration acts.

Losing the battle in 1924 had stung and part of that defeat revolved around WASP biologists. The victory in 1965 marked the defeat of the WASPs and so the time to go in for the kill.

.

"They thought if anyone believed in eugenics it would start another Holocaust. *Anything* could start another Holocaust, which is why we have to constantly fight against racism etc"

Some of the many millions killed in Bolshevik concentration camps were killed in eugenics experiments.

.

"How DO you account for the rapid change in attitudes toward homosexuality, tho?"

Schools and TV - same as always.

One pincer is getting to kids while they're very young. This cuts them off from their parent's values. The second pincer is the media's stick power being gradually exerted against anyone who disagrees and getting them fired or sanctioned in some other way.

The process speeds up over time because what can be done in the schools gets more radical the more people are cowed by the power of the media.

The media are basically a priesthood who can designate who is a heretic or not.

With a pluralistic media they would battle each other over who are the heretics and it would cancel out.

Does this mean that your pre-occupation with Jewishness is driven by an adolescent insecurity over the gap between jewish and white IQ, success etc? Or is it only Jewish people who are motivated by adolescent insecurity

Matt Ridley can be a bit of a thicko himself. He's big on "ideas having sex," which may help the collective, but individuals and their choices are still extremely important, as he should know.

For example, when he was chairman of Northern Rock Bank, they couldn't very well be run by the whole of British society and someone's bad decision -- likely Ridley's -- to get involved in subprime lending, caused a run on the bank and their nationalisation.

I guess some of those subprime borrowers didn't share ideas and co-operate enough to be able to pay their mortgages as expected.

An MZ/DZ twin study for homophobia suggest that 36% of the variance is explained by genetic factors (this rises to 51% taking assortive mating into account) although there are important differences between the sexes (.57 men, .27 women). Family influences seem to be very small to non-existent. It is hard to know how to square this with the very sudden and seemingly widespead changes in attitudes towards homosexuality.

In order to experience these things, they had to first invent farming, cities, diseases, alcohol and literacy. You first need to invent writing before you can adapt by 'experiencing' it. Chicken and egg.

"How DO you account for the rapid change in attitudes toward homosexuality, tho?"

1) A unanimous, full-court press by media and academia.

2) The fact that most people just don't know enough homosexuals, and aren't aware enough of their private lives, to recognize the lies being told in #1 and feel like it mattered enough to them to oppose it.

"There is no single human being on the planet, as Leonard Read famously pointed out, who knows how to make a pencil, let alone the internet, the economy or the government. The average IQ of a group, a team or a race matters little, if at all. What counts is how well they communicate, collaborate and exchange ideas. Give me a hundred thickos who talk to each other, rather than a hundred clever-clogs who don’t. This collaboration is surely the true secret of human achievement and the true reason that race does not count, not because we are all identical inside."

Ridley is quite that the basis of economic progress is collaboration. This is where the institutionalist presumption starts and they build their case.But in order to collaborate you need certain traits though. Fukuyama wrote about trust for example. Austrian economists have also highlighted time preference and interest rates as a indicator of the ability to supress the urge to consume now and invest in the future. It is steadly following during the middle ages and forward.

Not to mention that of two informal network groups,A and B, wouldn't the group with a better intelligence work better than the one with inferior intelligence?

Also at some point when others have paved the way to prosperity, all you have to do is follow the same path(ability to copy). Think of Japan and China now.

Here is a better explantion by Hans Hoppe who knows HBD and economics.

RE: I find it unconvincing. Jews may not have produced great naturalists but wouldn't Jewish accomplishments in medicine and related fields (e.g., organic chemistry) be enough to preclude Gould, Lewontin, et. al. from such feelings of insecurity?

I don't think accomplishments in medicine would be in any way related to evolutionary biology, which tended to studied strictly as an academic exercise for a long time. The practice of medicine long predates science to say nothing of evolution and Darwin who didn't publish the Origin of Species until 1859. Medicine until very recently I don't even think gave much space to evolutionary biology in a pedagogical sense. Even well into the 20th Century, a lot of medical school education was memorization of the facts of anatomy and physiology without evolutionary context.

Regarding chemistry, Jews may be overrepresented, but a much larger percentage of the leading chemists are not Jews, unlike math, physics, computer science, chess, economics, and law. There is a list of the 75 greatest chemists/chemical engineers of the last 75 years (1923-1998) published by the trade publication Chemical and Engineering News ( Corresponding to the first 75 years of the publication ) Jews do account for about one quarter of the people on the list, but according to the publication there were 4 chemists who stood out from the rest, being on virtually everyone's list: Pauling, Woodward, Seaborg, and Carothers, all 4 of them were Gentiles. This is also born out by Nobel Prizes in Chemistry, Jews won only 8 prizes through 1962, and didn't win their 9th until 1972. By contrast they had 26 Nobel Prizes in Medicine, and 23 Nobel Prizes in Physics by 1972.

2) Despite 1), attitudes toward gays have improved significantly toward gays this century. I think that is due largely to a change in behavior by gays. Steve has noted their elites' move toward monogamy, after the AIDS pandemic, and that's part of it, but there's also their change in tack from the transgression & aggression of, say, '80s AIDS activism, to their charm offensive of the '00s, as exemplified by Queer Eye For The Straight Guy. I think that show had a huge impact.

"But isn't communication, collaboration and the exchanging of ideas largely dependent upon a person's IQ? The higher the IQ, the better the ideas exchanged and communicated? " - A better signal to noise ratio is.

Does this mean that your pre-occupation with Jewishness is driven by an adolescent insecurity over the gap between jewish and white IQ, success etc?

Remarks like that point to the exasperating thing about Jews and race. They absolutely believe in the idea of race, and that they are a superior race - and they also insist that everybody else pretend that race does not exist.

Maybe there is an evolutionary advantage to be being able to hold two mutually exclusive ideas to be true. It seems to work well for Jews.

Dave Pinsen wrote: 'BTW, has anyone done a correlation between countries' average IQs and their postal systems? Something we take for granted is having postal addresses. I had dinner with a friend recently who has been to Ethiopia several times and he said even the fairly modern hotel he stays in there doesn't actually have a street address - it's just "the hotel near the airport".'

I was amused to read this and to reflect that the stateliest homes in Great Britain - and many others not so stately - have no street addresses. They are known by name only. Only urban dwellings ordinarily have numbered street addresses. A country house will have a name (e.g., "Northanger Abbey" or "Locksley Hall") followed by the name of the nearest village, the county, and a postal code. The mailing address gives only the most general idea of its location.

It's not jealousy over ethnic bragging rights. They thought if anyone believed in eugenics it would start another Holocaust. *Anything* could start another Holocaust, which is why we have to constantly fight against racism etc."

Is there a people who have practiced eugenics amongst themselves more than the Jews?

That was a traditional libertoid cliche he threw in, his version of "the rosy-fingered dawn" or "boots on the ground" or "I hate the Koch brothers," in reference to the Leonard Read econ-4-dummeez pamphlet (title inspiration presumably from Asimov and not Graves). Notice how the 'toids love yakking about how cheap stuff is today and all the great deals they can get on everything you need, because we really have reached the end of history; though we need more H-1Bs now that history's done with.

Weirdly that was the theme of Michael Mann's 2nd film (I mean the sleek n' stylish film director, not the climatology cosmetologist)... Weirder still the golem in question was art-designed by a French-Muslim-Bosnian cult comic book artist...

Big Bill said..."I tend to concur. Chabon seems to have shot his wad."

Ummm ... at least three or four times into Ayelet. Nice girl. Classic case. Arch feminist at Harvard Law School during Obama's tenure. Mental health struggles (by her admission).

What's really lame is when you terminal goys attempt -- poorly -- to parody a notional Philip Roth/Woody Allen/downtown-hipster-from-the-Kennedy-Administration persona; cuts like a Play-Doh knife and is almost as funny as a Sean Hayes sitcom.

Here's the Google Wallet FAQ. From it: "You will need to have (or sign up for) Google Wallet to send or receive money. If you have ever purchased anything on Google Play, then you most likely already have a Google Wallet. If you do not yet have a Google Wallet, don’t worry, the process is simple: go to wallet.google.com and follow the steps." You probably already have a Google ID and password, which Google Wallet uses, so signing up Wallet is pretty painless.

You can put money into your Google Wallet Balance from your bank account and send it with no service fee.

Google Wallet works from both a website and a smartphone app (Android and iPhone -- the Google Wallet app is currently available only in the U.S., but the Google Wallet website can be used in 160 countries).

Or, once you sign up with Google Wallet, you can simply send money via credit card, bank transfer, or Wallet Balance as an attachment from Google's free Gmail email service. Here'show to do it.

(Non-tax deductible.)

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Fifth: if you have a Chase bank account (or, theoretically,other bank accounts), you can transfer money to me (with no fees) via Chase QuickPay (FAQ). Just tell Chase QuickPay to send the money to my ancient AOL email address (steveslrATaol.com -- replace the AT with the usual @). If Chase asks for the name on my account, it's Steven Sailer with an n at the end of Steven. (Non-tax deductible.)

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